I love the song "The Water is Wide" by Deanta. But when I looked up the lyrics, I found the traditional irish lyrics and fell in love with them. I was dissapointed to see that Deanta left out verses and changed some. I was wondering if there was an artist that stuck to the traditional version, all verses included.

I'd be a bit leery of defining the generally accepted version of a song so widely sung in so many versions. See the threads linked above. I am sure most singers know better than three verses! And I have heard as many sing the last verse differently than you have given it.

This song and its antecedent, Waly, Waly, is one of the oldest known songs in English and is documented through scores of iterations. A lot of information asbout can be found in the threads of discussion linked at the top of this one, and by searching for "Waly, Waly" in the Forum.

Child of the Sea, what verses are they that you feel are "traditional"? In the various threads we have at the Mudcat, there are, arguably, roughly 18 verses, separate and distinct. If you want to go through some of the threads you will find some of the information that, among others, Malcolm Douglas (I think), posted regarding some of the oldest versions collected and published.

What I'm trying to say is that there is not ONE OFFICIAL version of this song. Many people sing it, and have learned it from one person who had sung certain verses, whether that was the way they learned it or it fit a certain "time" length they wanted.

Personally, I enjoy any version I hear of the song.

Should this thread be folded into one of the others? Or perhaps the thread should say "Water is Wide - Official Version?"

As George Seto says , Look at all the verses you can find , discard the ones you dont like and adapt the rest til you reach a manageable size . I have enough verses to Barbara Allen to sing it it for twenty five minutes if I wish , but dont really want a song more than six or seven verses long for normal use ! The 'Water is Wide' in the D T is more or less the same as I use !

Probably they all use the same tune, and will be arrangements of the usual form of the song that turns up on commercial recordings (though in some cases with verses added or subtracted, and words changed or moved around) which can be traced almost invariably to a set published early in the 20th century.

The Water is Wide, as most people know it, was found by Cecil Sharp in Somerset in the early years of the 20th century (the text is a collation from more than one singer); he published it between 1904 and 1906 in the UK, and in 1916 in the USA. The commonly-recorded form (popularised in the American folk revival by Pete Seeger, who got it from his sister Peggy, who seems to have got it from one of Sharp's books) is not Irish at all, but English. Seeger added a verse to it himself.

Part of the confusion over the song is that some early collectors, noticing that it shared verses with Waly Waly decided that it "must" be a "version" of that song; a misapprehension which has stuck, and is regularly repeated to this day. Sharp didn't actually make that claim, though he published it as Oh Waly Waly, commenting "The words are so closely allied to the well-known Scottish ballad ... that I have published [it] under the same title."

In truth only a few verses are shared (and not the "water is wide" verse); and many of these turn up in many other songs. For the uninitiated, such things are generally called "floating" verses, and are a commonplace of traditional song, capable of leading the unwary into guessing at all manner of connections which often turn out to be mere illusion. Whole songs are composed of such verses, and regularly lead folk into the error of assuming things like "Waly Waly and The Water is Wide are [versions of] the same song". That is a gross over-simplification. They share material, but are distinct, separate pieces.

This being the case, it is hard for us to be sure what the "complete" version you mention might actually be. The song (and others like it, related and unrelated) has been discussed here at considerable length in the past, though, and you might like to have a look at some of the earlier threads, to which links have now been added at the head of this page.

Once you've found the lyric that you know as the "complete" one, point us to it (don't bother to quote it here; it will almost certainly have been posted several times already) and people will then be able to tell you who has recorded it. If, as I suspect, you mean the Sharp collation (the "DigiTrad" example shown above as THE WATER IS WIDE derives from it, though the words have been changed around a bit), then people have been recording arrangements of it for a long while -some have already been mentioned- though it is only in recent years that the marketing boom in "Celtic" music has led people to imagine that it is an Irish song. There are related songs in Irish tradition, as in those of all other countries where English is spoken; but they have their own tunes, and rarely include the "water is wide" verse.

The whole issue is extraordinarily complicated (though not quite as impossible as the Died for Love group of songs) and pretty much incapable of satisfactory resolution. It's safest to say no more than that the songs belong to a loose, and very large, "family" (or group of families) with shared or overlapping characteristics, without necessarily being directly related to one another. Correspondences can be useful but it's unwise to attach too much weight to them on their own; you'll have noticed, for instance, comments made here in the past by people who seemed to be under the impression that all songs beginning "As I walked out" were related!

The subject has been covered quite extensively in older threads. We'd best try to keep to the one song here, I think, if we're not to make things too confusing. My own post was rather long, I fear; but intended to narrow the discussion down rather than expand on it.

We all did/do don't we? Malcolm Douglas, as always, has covered it all, but here's my 2 cents worth. Childofthesea - Listen to them all - that's my advice. Read all the various sets of lyrics. Search back as far as you can and learn as much as you can about the songs that you fall in love with. Mudcat is an excellent place to start. Then sing the songs as you feel them. Include the verses you prefer and leave out the others. I always try to introduce a song by briefly giving its background. I'm very careful to check my sources and always go back to the earliest printed example. Otherwise all I say is "I learned this from ...." Good luck - the journey is just begining. From another Child of the Sea. Joy

It's such a beautiful song and I worked out an arrangement that I was really pleased with. But after we performed it at our local club (Haverfolk) a fiendishly talented little git called Trevor Sharples came up with a devastating parody called My Bottom Is Wide . We now get more requests for that than the original :-(